Blogging - A Perspective

chillibreeze writer — Nitya Prashant

It is the age of social connectedness. Present an opinion, share an idea, support a cause, talk about where your organization is heading or set out to make the world a better place. Whatever it is that you want to do – the world is now reading. On your blog, that is.

Blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon and traces its origin to the online diary, in which people posted a record of their daily lives, links and anything else they wanted to share. Among the earliest sites which promoted the online diary was Open Diary which was launched in 1998. It was the first service to allow users to add their comments on posts.

John Barger coined the term ‘weblog’ but it was in 1999, that Peter Merholz first used the word ‘blog’ to describe his online journal.

Blogging took off in a big way when blogging services were introduced. Users were able to publish and manage their content by clicking on predetermined options rather than by writing HTML code. Users were no longer required to understand the technical aspects of blogging. These dedicated blog hosting services which provided both free and paid content management services also helped to standardize the blogging format so that the process of creating, storing and publishing blogs was roughly similar, irrespective of the platform used.

Blogger and Wordpress are among the most popular blogging services today. AOL, Yahoo and MSN have launched their own blogging tools as well. Indian sites like Rediff and Indiatimes have added blogging to their websites too.
In India, blogging was slow to take off, partly because of the technological limitations and language differences. The introduction of blogging in regional languages has seen more people becoming a part of the blogosphere. While exact estimates are unavailable, a recent article in Mint, states that there may be anywhere between 200, 000 and half a million bloggers in India.

And what do these bloggers write about? Everything that you can imagine would be right answer! There are the ever popular mommy blogs which narrate experiences of bringing up children in today’s challenging world and recipe blogs detailing Indian food recipes with regional variations. The NRI population which blogs about the challenges of living abroad as well as technology blogs, political blogs, fashion blogs, sports blogs, movie and book reviews, travel blogs, art and music blogs, interior decoration blogs and many more.

Celebrities are using blogs to promote their films, clarify their stance on issues and keep in touch with fans. Among the many celebrities blogging are Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shekar Kapur Karan Johar, Shobhaa De and Manjula Padmanabhan.

The personal blog continues to remain the most common form of blogging. Family, friends and even random strangers who happen to stumble upon the blog become dedicated readers.

While personal blogs are more about the joy of writing and of keeping a permanent record, blogs also have the potential to become revenue spinners thanks to tools like AdSense. India has its first professional blogger in Amit Agrawal who runs Digital Inspiration, a blog dedicated to technology news and reviews.

There are also bloggers turned authors such as Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy, Parul Sharma and Amit Varma.

Organizations such as Google, HP, and IBM, among others, are getting into the act as well. Companies use blogs to promote their new products, provide information on services they have and for general marketing and public relations.

Blogs are now moving beyond the personal into the community space. Bloggers function as ‘citizen journalists’ – providing information when disaster strikes. For example, during the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, bloggers wrote about events as it happened and provided helpline numbers.

Blogs are now also about supporting a cause or about giving back to the world. Examples of such blogs include India Helps, began by a community of bloggers and Hari Bhatti, who tells us he is fighting for ‘truth, justice and a sustainable world’.

Blogs have different objectives and reasons for their existence. But it is clear that there is something addictive about talking to a community of like minded people, of discussing ideas and changing the way the world is in some way. No matter what the purpose of writing the blog is, it is a trend that is likely to grow in influence in the years to come.

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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in November, 2009. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Nitya has a Master's degree in English Literature and is working as a writer for 10 years now. She has experience in technical writing, report writing, article writing and web content writing. She is currently based in Mumbai.

Blogging - A Perspective

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